Red Pepper P2P Interview

Michel Bauwens interviewed by Hilary Wrainwright of the Scottish Red Pepper magazine.

Interview

Question 1

This interview is part of an exploration into the question: 'if not capitalism, what? ' It is a question posed in a very practical way by the present crisis. It's not that capitalism is in death throes from which it cannot recover. In some, partially altered form there's no doubt it will recover - depending on how strong are the pressures and actualities of alternatives. The point is that the crisis is leading millions of people to question the legitimacy and social viability of the economic system that has produced this mess, often they are questioning it without knowing the alternatives, or even the direction and path to or means of creating alternatives. So I'm interviewing several people who have been putting forward frameworks for an alternative mode of production/economic and political system or key elements of such, based on alternatives they perceive to be already emerging. I'm asking them how their ideas offer a different economic logic to that which has produced the present crisis and what proposals they would now make - using this moment of collapse of the old order , when it is appropriate to think boldly about the possibilities of the new - to strengthen the emergent alternatives.

So, question 1.

In your 'Political economy of peer production' you argue that 'peer production gives rise to the emergence of a third mode of production, a third mode of governance, and a third mode of property, that is poised to overhaul our political economy in unprecedented ways'. You go on to justify these claims in the following way:

'Peer to peer processes

• produce use-value through the free cooperation of producers who have access to distributed capital: this is the P2P production mode, a 'third mode of production' different from for-profit or public production by state-owned enterprises. Its product is not exchange value for a market, but use-value for a community of users.
• are governed by the community of producers themselves, and not by market allocation or corporate hierarchy: this is the P2P governance mode, or 'third mode of governance.'
• make use-value freely accessible on a universal basis, through new common property regimes. This is its distribution or 'peer property mode': a 'third mode of ownership,' different from private property or public (state) property.'

Reply 1

Most Red Pepper readers are familiar with P2P sharing of music and film and will have sensed some of the radical potential of this, ditto with open software of which many will be users but not so many will have come to see either as the bases of a new mode of production. Could you explain exactly the scope of P2P production?. Perhaps to make things clear, could you begin with its existing scope and then sketch out its potential. Could you give as many empirical examples as possible so that the emergence of this new mode of production becomes clear and vivid to readers who are not immersed in all the debates within the open software/P2P movement.

The scope of P2P is universal, but at the same time poses a major obstacle, and I will try to explain both.

First of all, the universal scope. Peer to peer is the self-aggregation of people around common value creation on a global scale, thanks to the new technical affordances that have been created in the last decade.

This cooperation is based on free engagement, and hence represents non-alienated 'work', driven by personal interests and passion. There are many reasons to believe that once a community establishes itself and gains sufficient traction, that it then becomes 'hyperproductive', both subjectively and objectively. Subjectively, because intrinsic and positive motivation is practically unbeatable by extrinsic negative (fear) and positive (greed and interest) motivations. Objectively, because the characteristics of such way of working (i.e. equipotential participation, communal validation processes, distribution of tasks instead of division of labour, ad hoc meritocratic leadership, active engagement of users and large base of contributors) are very hard to match by any for-profit competitor. However, because such a community also needs an infrastructure of cooperation, we usually get hybrid modes, where the self-managed community, is coupled with a non-profit foundation that manages its infrastructure, and a ecology of business operating on the basis of the wealth of the commons, in the marketplace. Through the practice of benefit-sharing, these businesses support the common infrastructure, which in turn strengthens the community. My 'law of asymmetric competition'states that once a for-profit, relying on proprietary formats, faces such a competition, it can pretty much close it doors.

Empirical examples are Microsoft's Explorer vs. the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox, and the proprietary Brittanica vs. the open Wikipedia. The p2pfoundation wiki has hundreds of other case studies, compiled by a global independent research community.

That dynamic is by no means limited to the production of immaterial goods, such as open content and free software, but is now rapidly moving to open and shared designs, what is often called open hardware. The reason is simple: anything that need to be physically produced, needs to be intellectually designed. Readers may want to check the http://p2pfoundation.net/Product_Hacking for a list of nearly 150 'open hardware' projects, with a sizeable number having already reached maturation.

But here comes the obstacle: peer production of immaterial goods needs the free individual aggregation of immaterial means of production, i.e. brains, computers and access to socialized networks, but physical production needs cost-recovery methods.

This limit suggests that more fundamental change still requires fundamental changes in political and social power, so that peer production can be matched with cooperative production in the physical sphere. The alternative, which I think is likely in a transitional period, is 'built-only capitalism', driven by a new sector of netarchical capitalists, which instead of relying on Intellectual Property, decides to 'enable and empower participation', and profit from it. Thus a new frontier of social cooperation and conflict is created, between proprietary platform owners and user communities (what I call the sharing model); and between productive communities and the surrounding business ecologies (what I call the commons model). The sharing model is based on the need and desire of individuals to share their creative production, the commons model is based on the creation of common artefacts. Both models have different logics , social structures, and underlying social contracts.

I think that social change will also be a function of a new structure of desire in contemporary youth: once you have tasted 'non-alienated' voluntary participation in an online productive community, you are strongly motivated to extend it to the whole of life, and this drives the emergence of a powerful global movement that embraces three new paradigms of social organization: open and free availability of 'raw material' for cooperation, participative modes of production impacting the design of techno-social cooperation, and commons-oriented output, available to all. This combination of these three principles creates a 'circulation of the commons' which ensures thesocial reproduction of peer to peer modes and their communities.

Question 2.

a) We are most familiar with this communal sharing in the immaterial sphere of goods that can be infinitely reproduced, how does it influence / impact on the material production process , or the production process as a whole - given that the material and immaterial are so interconnected? Could you say something about different kinds of impact, for example in real terms and in terms of presenting metaphors for new, collaborative, mutually beneficial ways of thinking about productive relationships? (again , if you don't mind, please be as empirical as possible, in terms of examples . )

b) And the other side of this relationship between the immaterial and the material, can you say anything about what material conditions most favour the development of the new collaborative, communal mode of production? You mention the idea of a basic income for example, could you expand on this? Presumably peer production provides a new, strong argument for a basic income in that it is in part about a sphere of creation of use value outside of the monetary/waged economy and the basic income enables people to have an autonomy from the wage labour/selling their labour power. How far could its use in the wage/ monetary economy help to create the surplus wealth/ increase in productivity /social efficiency that can provide the basic income for all? (I'm thinking here of both increases of productivity in the production of goods and increased social efficiency in the provision of public services)

Could it play any particular role in strengthening the social economy ? (through facilitating collaboration across social enterprises for example? creating common knowledge resources?) (as i pose these questions I am reminded of Andre Gorz argument about an autonomous sphere and a heteronomous sphere - if i remember rightly. Has his work been an influence on you?) What are the legal and institutional conditions for protective this collaborative communal form of production from private appropriation or marginalisation? What role does the state have in this process of protection and spreading e.g providing access to the internet for all, without controlling it?

Reply 2

I believe I covered the possible expansion of peer production from the immaterial to the material sphere in my previous reply. Now, under what conditions can this be facilitated. First of all, we have to understand that what happened as 'miniaturisation of the means of immaterial production', i.e. the computer and the networks, is going to happen, is happening, in the sphere of the means of material production. Access to capital is becoming a lot cheaper, and we have objective trends like mail-order machining (emachineshop), desktop manufacturing (ponoko), personal fabrication (fablabs), rapid prototyping and tooling, distributed biological manufacturing capabilities, etc … This means the possibility arises of more self-aggregation of material productive assets. The same is happening in the financial field, with the emergence of social lending (prosper, zopa), a revival of mutual credit, and local and affinity-based currencies that can be attached to non-capitalist protocols and design rules. The possibility arises of a combination of a new cooperative and relocalized economy, coupled with global and interconnected open design communities. If we can also re-invent property modes, away from the current monopolization of financial property, such trends will be speeded up enormously.

It is important to understand that peer production creates a value crisis, a crisis of accumulation if you want, for the capitalist economy, of which both owners and producers are the victim. The reason is that more and more of the essential innovation becomes social, the result of the emergent networks of distributed collaboration in open communities. We have created the ability for an exponential growth in the direct creation of use value (think of the hundred million of downloaded videos via YouTube, a quantum leap in social production compared to the mass media model), but only a linear growth of monetization. Google may be a giant, but only a fraction of websites can live from online advertising. So, while Linux creates a $40b economy, it at the same time annually destroys $65b in the proprietary software business. While it undermines old business models, it also creates precarity amongst the workers.

The short term solution is organized benefit-sharing between productive communities, the non-profit foundations managing the infrastructure, and the businesses profiting from the commons. It works well for Linux, but is only reactive. Yet, 75% of Linux programmers are now paid, and recently, while I attended a free software congress in Ecuador, I was told that zero percent of free software programmers in that continent are unemployed.

Ultimately, these ad hoc evolutions are not sufficient, and as countries and regions recognize that their 'competitivity' largely depends on such open innovation, may start thinking in terms of basic income. The advantage of it, as recognition of the value each citizen's create for society through his natural participation in such networks, is that it creates a smooth way for workers to move in and out of the market, much like the system of the monkhood in South-East Asia, where I live. I think this is still politically realistic though, so I think European policy makers can focus on extending 'transitional labour market' policies, already in effect in many countries to smoothen the transition between jobs, be extended to a recognition of participation in productive networks, as a legitimate pursuit in transition periods. So we have three levels of intervention: benefit-sharing by specific industries, transitional labour market support for workers, and a more long-term move towards the basic income. As you suggest, such a basic income would not only benefit immaterial peer production, but also the experimentation with social and cooperative means of material production.

Commons-based policy solutions, for example the cap and dividend mechanism proposed by Peter Barnes, can create a dynamic for a basic income and value creation. In such a scheme, applied to a skytrust and carbon creation, each citizen has a right to a fair carbon footprint, and excesses are paid to a common fund, going to those that do not use their right. In that way, a basic income is naturally funded.

However, I call for a fundamental re-orientation of public policy, around the notion of a partner state, which enables and empowers the direct social value creation. I have proposed a set of three institutions to promote commons-based peer production:

1. An institute for the creation and protection of the commons, which promotes and sustains the creation of new modes of value creation;
2. An institute for open business, which promotes models of social entrepreneurship so that each commons can create an ecology of enterprises;
3. An Institute for Benefit-Sharing and Commons Recognition, which focuses on patronage and various forms of support that do not destroy the peer to peer logic of voluntary contributions. It creates a priori prizes, awards, bounties to support individuals involved in commons-based value-creation

A partner state approach, combined with a strengthening of peer property formats, and new forms of capital ownership such as those proposed by Chris Cook or Peter Barnes, combined with mutual credit and non-capitalist money, would go a very long way in stimulating the autonomous sphere of production. Growing the counter-economy and a social life based on a new logic, is not something to start after we gain political power, but right now.

(I appreciate and have read Gorz, but relatively late in my own development, so I cannot say his influence has been major, however, I have been influenced by the French-italian school of 'cognitive capitalism')

Question 3 .

How far is this current crisis of the deregulated capitalist economy also an opportunity for the new communal, collaborative mode of production that you see emerging? How do you respond to the widespread desire for a change in the direction and nature of present economic arrangements? Or how do you see P2P responding to the crisis? Is this a moment to push the basic income, partly as a creative response to counter the destructive consequences of the recession, at the same time facilitating the transition to a predominance of this new mode of production? Ditto a moment to urge the creation of universal access to a new IT public infrastucture.

Reply 3

I certainly don't want to discourage any movement towards a basic income, though I think the social crisis is not deep enough for this to be a realistically contemplated alternative. I also don't think that at this stage we have a magic bullet or solution against the disintegration of the neoliberal system. So I think we should continue to furiously build the counter-society within the old, but that a new stage of physicalisation has been reached. I think that the emergence of open/free, participatory, and commons-oriented movements, which occurred in all fields but started around 'immaterial cooperation', is now ready to be matched by their counterparts in the 'physical world'. So I expect to see a speed-up of real world alternatives in many different fields: more localization efforts such as Transition Towns, more use of alternative currencies and mutual credit, the rapid growth of global open design efforts with local partners in the field of real production.

Finally, I think that we have reached another transition, which is from the construction of the alternative social logics, to a more active engagement with policy. We need to create policy networks to react more powerfully and quickly against threats, but also to push for reforms with the help of sympathetic politicians. This work has hardly begun, and needs to be speeded up.

What we need is a convergence of immaterial open and free knowledge movements, environmental open design solutions, and social justice movements.

What I see in front of us is a choice between the high and the low road to peer to peer dominance. In the high road scenario, the 'enlightened part' of the establishment, those with a long term vision who know the endgame is near, will push through a new global compact based on green capitalism, which can simply not function without much greater participation in social and political design. Compare it to the 18th century which saw the downward trend of the nobles and the rise of the bourgeoisie, reaching a temporary point of equilibrium. Green capitalism would allow such a scenario to unfold, leading to a new great surge of technological and social innovation as predicted by Carlota Perez.

But if you believe, like I do, that capitalism as infinite growth is fundamentally unsustainable, this will then set the stage for a new transition phase and peer to peer becoming the core social logic, with markets becoming subsystems for particular goods.

The low road is a quick and long term destabilization of the system, the end of the Roman empire scenario, leading to the emergence of local resilient communities, using p2p principles on a local scale, and leading to a transformation process which will be very reminiscent of the transformation to feudalism. This would come at a great social cost.

Of course, reality will most likely present a combination of both scenarios.

Question 4

4. One last question - a bit vague, so ignore it if you want: underpinning different forms of production, or at least debates about their desirability are different theories of knowledge . Thus the notion of the centralised social engineering state is to a significant degree premised on the positivistic, monistic understanding of knowledge as restricted to scientific laws that can be codified and centralised as if in a single brain; the underpinning of the notion of the free market and its moral superiority as mechanism of economic order is the idea of tacit and practical knowledge understood as inherently individual , with the implication that no kind of conscious co-ordination or collaboration will have anything like its intended results .

Consequently , on this argument (originally Hayek's ), the only alternative to dictatorship is the economic order which emerges haphazrdly through the working of the price mechanisms of the market.

How far would you say that the collaborative relations of the new mode of production made possible through open software and P2P production is based on a distinct notion of knowledge as plural, practical and theoretical and above all as sharable and social? In which there can be a connection between purpose and intention but not an entirely predictable one? one that is always the subject of experiment? and self-reflection? Any thoughts on this and its implications?

Reply 4:

There is a fundamental difference between the market and distributed p2p dynamics, which is exactly the reason it needs to replace market fundamentalist premises. A market is like the swarming dynamics of insects, and lacks intentionality. Participants only seek their own advantage, and the system cannot take into account any externalities, so the system destroys the biosphere and has a very hight social cost. Peer to peer dynamics are quite different: it's a goal or object oriented sociality, which unites people around the common object, which is almost generally the construction of a public or common good. Therefore externalities are built in the very fabric of peer to peer dynamics.

Hayek was right that state centralization was doomed, public authorities can now only be in charge of helping the coordination of the social field, and to rebalance with purpose what the market logic and the peer to peer logic cannot achieve; but he was wrong in posing as an alternative a inhuman and isolating social process based on mutual greed. The true distributed alternative to the centralizing and authoritarian state is not the market, which may only continue to exist to regulate the allocation of non-essential rival goods, but the peer to peer dynamic of conscious human groups creating common and public value.

So what we'll have is a type of civilization based on a core peer to peer logic of value creation in the immaterial field, coupled with cooperative production modes in the field of physical production, with a partner state existing as a servant to civil society, and acting as an arbiter between the 3 modes of production, governance, and property. The remaining market logics will be subjected to peer arbitrage, such as the new forms of social entrepreneurship and fair trade arealready pointing at. It will need to reverse the current reliance of pseudo-abundance in the material field, coupled with artificial scarcity in the field of immaterial exchange, into its opposite.

The alternative, to contemplate collective suicide of humankind, seems to incredible to contemplate.

Of course all of this has epistemological, ontological and axiological implications. Basically, we will be moving not to premodern holism, but to networked relationality, and to a epistemology of collective intelligence, predicated to soliciting the right individual contribution, 'just in time', or order for the common projects to proceed. Rather than a competition of for-profit companies, we will encounter a competition of ideological (but not in the classic sense of the term) and cultural projects, vying for individual engagement which will create vast and complex human artefacts, which like the cathedrals of yore, will be the central core of our coming societal forms.